Author George R. R. Martin tried desperately to talk HBO out of making a TV show out of his epic “Game of Thrones” books — for fear that a flop would kill his popular series, according to a new book.

“It’s too big. It’s too complicated. It’s too expensive,” he told the show’s prospective producers, according to “Inside HBO’s Game of Thrones,” a new, $40 companion book published last week.

In a preface written by Martin, the author says he told producers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss that “Hollywood Boulevard is lined with the skulls and bleached bones” of people who tried and failed to adapt popular literature for the movies.

The success of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy had sent a number of movie producers to Martin, he writes, trying to buy the rights to his sprawling fantasy series.

One even wanted to reduce all seven of his books (two unwritten) into a single movie, Martin said.

His biggest fear about a TV version of his first book was that a failure would cause fans to question their dedication to the series — and kill the community of readers that had grown around “A Song of Ice and Fire,” as the entire series is called.